Unknown Soldier

The Lowdown
For many of the current generation of heavy metal listeners around the world, 1983 was probably the year zero or their anno domini as far as heavy metal was concerned. As many of these listeners got into metal by listening to what can be termed as ‘extreme metal’ from bands like Metallica and Slayer back in 1983, or more likely later on when they were looking into the history of these bands, as this was the logical place where their heavy metal education had taken them back to (as everything else that came before this probably wasn’t extreme enough for them) Slayer had formed just a few years earlier in 1981 and would soon go onto become the metal band that your parents and the conservative do-gooders had warned you about (as they had with all those video nasty flicks in the 1980s) which meant that Slayer were now guaranteed to go onto become one of the most revered metal bands to ever set foot on this planet of ours! The thunderous sound, the aggressive image and the satanic paraphernalia connected to the band, would help to give birth to not just only thrash metal, but would also help to sow the seeds of the other soon to arrive extreme metal genres as well. They would also soon rival the influence of Black Sabbath in the annals of heavy metal, who had of course stomped over familiar dark metal territory over a decade earlier. All this though is actually a far cry from very early Slayer, who had originally plied their trade at The Woodstock venue in LA opening for other metal bands like the female fronted Bitch and the band’s then evil and somewhat gharish stage image, had them immediately pinned more in the glam metal mould, rather than in the macho ultra-aggressive thrash stance that they would soon adopt and these early promo images are probably an embarrassment to the band, but who really cares! They impressed enough though to be signed up by the influential underground Metal Blade label and appeared on the Metal Massacre Compilation III 1983 pressing (in fact when 1983 is finished I’ll be covering some of these comps as an extra) The recording of their debut album would establish the band’s seminal line-up, which consisted of the Chilean born Tom Araya-bass/vocals, the double guitar team of Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman who also penned most of the album, and finally possibly the band’s most revered musician in Cuban born drummer Dave Lombardo. Show No Mercy covered metal territory that had only really been covered previously by a band like Venom, who on their first two albums Welcome to Hell and Black Metal (see reviews) had dared to venture into the darkers depths of metal, but that’s where the similarities between the two ended, as Slayer went in for something faster and meaner than Venom and their b-movic theatrics had ever envisaged. Show No Mercy starts with the expected blitzkrieg attack (it’s expected today but it wasn’t back then and makes you realise how Poland must’ve felt in 1939) on the album opener “Evil Has No Boundaries” here the music and guitar work is frenetic and faster than anything that had gone before it and we are introduced to the soon to be trademark high pitched screams of Tom Araya, and over the song you can hardly hear what he’s screaming about with the odd exception of words like ‘evil’ or ‘satan’ but you know the subject matter here is delightful anti-christian rhetoric! Then we have the equally impressive thrash staples in “Antichrist” and “Die By the Sword”. But it’s with “Fight to the Death” that you realise that the album is going to be completely one dimensional in regards to the other tracks (as was a lot of early thrash) as the band rework a lot of their already amazing riffs throughout the rest of the album, without bringing too much new to the table as say a band like Iron Maiden would’ve done etc (I know that’s an unjust comparison given that Iron Maiden were at the height of their powers at this time) even though a-side closer “Maelstrom/Face the Slayer” pushes this envelope further than expected in regards to this. The drumming by soon to be thrash god drummer Dave Lombardo is frighteningly pinpoint and the guitar leads by Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman are both amazing and seem interchangeable to me as I can never tell the difference between the two, but then again I’m not a guitarist. But the singular feature that really stands out for me over the album, is the magnificent dark undercurrent that flows through the whole album, which suggests that no band had genuinely sounded this evil before.

Tom Araya- Bass/vocals
Kerry King- Guitar
Jeff Hanneman- Guitar
Dave Lombardo- Drums

Production- Brian Slagel

__________________
Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

William_the_Bloody

Wow, I wasn't expecting Accept to beat out Slayer, but its all good. Honestly as wicked as some of the tracks are on this album, none of them can touch Balls to the Wall.

I do tend have a soft spot for Slayer's first release though, as it sounds like they are working with more traditional minor pentatonic scales instead of the chromatics of later years, which I was never too hot in.

Anyways awesome thread, keep it up